Page 67 of Degradation (The Brethren Lords #3)

Pailtyn

T he darkness breathes around me, thick and suffocating, pressing against my skin like sopping wet velvet.

I can’t remember how long I’ve been here, minutes, hours, a lifetime? It’s all become meaningless. Time is a concept that dissolved along with everything else I thought I knew about reality.

My throat burns. It feels like I’ve been swallowing shards of glass.

Have I been screaming?

The sound echoes back to me now. A raw, animalistic wail that doesn’t sound like my voice at all.

It bounces off invisible walls, multiplying until it becomes a chorus of my own despair. Until it becomes an echo that never truly dies, it just fades into the background hum of this place, wherever this place is.

I press my palms against what feels like stone. My fingers explore the surface, searching for seams, for doors, for any indication of escape. But there’s nothing. Just endless wall stretching in every direction I turn.

The texture is rough beneath my touch, and I realize with a distant sort of horror that some of the wetness I feel isn’t condensation, it’s blood. My blood.

When did I start clawing at these walls? I look down at my hands, though I can see nothing in this absolute darkness.

A ragged bitter laugh escapes me then as I remember that I wouldn’t be able to see if the entire space was illuminated.

They took my eyes. They took my fucking eyes.

It shouldn’t be funny. It isn’t fucking funny. And yet, in this moment, it damned well is.

I can feel the jagged edges where my fingernails used to be, the raw flesh beneath. The pain should stop me, but it doesn’t. If anything, it drives me harder. I rake my fingers across the stone again, feeling skin tear, feeling something warm run down my wrists.

Pain is the only thing that feels real anymore.

Pain is the only proof that I’m actually alive.

My body shakes, from cold, from fear, from exhaustion. I can’t tell which. Maybe all three. Maybe none. Maybe this trembling is just another lie my mind is telling me, another betrayal in a long line of betrayals that have brought me to this place of absolute nothing.

“Help me.” I whisper, and my voice cracks like old paper.

The words disappear into the void, swallowed by darkness so complete it seems to have weight. “Please, someone help me.”

But who would help me now? Who is left?

Old memories come in fragments, sharp-edged pieces that cut at my consciousness.

Faces that turned away. Promises that crumbled like ash.

Hands that pushed me down when I needed them to pull me up.

Everyone—everyone—chose something else over me.

They chose safety, comfort, or their own preservation. They chose anything but me.

Except, he didn’t.

I know it now. I understand it now.

He didn’t choose to betray me, not really. He was saving me.

I just didn’t understand it then.

I thought he was my enemy, I thought he was trying to steal me away, that that was the words he was whispering when I was too weak and tired to understand them. That wasn’t the justice he was offering. He wasn’t giving me freedom, he was giving me something far more precious than that.

I don’t know where he is now.

I don’t know… I freeze up, lock up, as I hear those dreaded, awful steps.

Guthrie is here. Guthrie is back.

I swallow down the whimper, curling up all those parts of myself that are still me and I slip back, slip away, become the thing he’s made of me.

The dead, and yet still breathing creature, lost to the darkness.